 What I'll do is I'll just give a brief statement and then you can ask questions after that. That's it everyone. My voice is fairly low so you might have to adjust the sound. And I'm, if you haven't already met me, Detective Superintendent Cameron Harsley, Child Safety Director and Operations Manager for Child Safety Sexual Crimes Group. Welcome everyone. This week is a week which Task Force Argos and the Queensland Police Service is very grateful for. We're currently hosting officers from other jurisdictions which include Western Australia, Northern Territory, South Australia, Tasmania, Australia, Federal Police and more importantly, two officers from the Singapore Police Force. This week is a course which Task Force Argos is leading and running. The course is designed to improve and build capability within policing to investigate, detect and solve online crimes against children. The course itself has a high degree of skill and knowledge to complete and more importantly we are sharing our knowledge and our skill base across other jurisdictions to attack what we see as a global issue. Predominantly this crime class is a global crime class in that I say that people from across the world, wherever you have computers you'll have this type of crime existing. So what we're trying to do is build capacity within other countries to help us detect and solve this type of crime. So Singapore Police themselves are here this week to build their capacity in regard to detection of online offences against children. So Singapore isn't a hub though in terms of... We're not seeing more cases related to Singapore at all. It's just that it's just one other jurisdiction. It's just one other jurisdiction. It's a large jurisdiction. It has obviously a network or a gateway as you'd like to Asia. So it is an area that we're very keen to focus on. Are there any new trends emerging? I think what we're finding now is that people with this unsavory interest towards children are starting to engage in what we will call innocent websites to then try and contact children through. So by innocent websites I mean family orientated websites or websites which you would not think child pornography or child exploitation material as we call it would exist. But it's an avenue for accessing children or family contacts through normal activity websites. I'd like to name the websites but can you be a little bit more specific about the kinds of websites you're talking about? Well the danger for websites is if you have a website where you're exposing any personal details i.e. where you live details of your children and easy access of those details then they are targets. Social networking or family? Social networking sites, predominantly. How is this different to anything else in Australia? Task Force Argos is the leader in Australia and also nationally. The methodologies that we're using at the moment I think are very effective. We used to have a minimal hit rate. Our hit rate at Task Force Argos now is 85% plus when we're online. Is this a big partnership particularly in Singapore? Does anyone have any other police services in Australia doing something like this? What do you mean by 85% hit rate? When we talk about hit rates you can get online and you can engage with potential offenders or people online. And often those people online will not engage enough to commit an offence or they may not be grooming children. But the methodologies we're using now when one of our law enforcement participants jumps online tonight within a very short period of time he will have engaged somebody trying to groom a child online. And that engagement traditionally used to take a series of engagements online. We're getting so effective now what we're finding is our officers are online for very short periods of time five or ten minutes and they've engaged somebody with an unsavory interest towards children. Does that suggest that not only are you getting better but there are a lot more of them? I think the use of the internet there's a volume issue there. I think also the other issue too is people engaging in online activity towards children seem to think they're not going to get caught still. Can I just say from the outset that if you're online and you're engaging with activity towards grooming children for an unsavory purpose it's not a matter of if we catch you, it's a matter of when we will catch you now. Can you give us an indication of growth in the last five years in this sort of activity? I will probably just allude to this that online activity that we have at Argos we predominantly may have had 30 to 50 targets. We can generate hundreds of targets now across the world. What does that mean exactly? In a context I'll put it online in this term. If we were to jump online now within five or ten minutes we'd probably engage with somebody who wants to groom a child or trade child exploitation material with us. I know you can't tell us much but give us an indication of what sort of methods you are using to catch these guys out? Yes while we're online as doing activity it's known in fact that we use pseudonyms as children. We're having a more and more trend as public awareness has come forward that members of the community are coming forward with details of people that have tried to engage their children online. So often we will take over the accounts of those children and then re-engage the person who was originally target at that child. So community support in that regard has been very helpful of late which we appreciate. Are parents generally aware that this sort of thing could happen to their children? I think community awareness is something we have to continually push. We have had many awareness campaigns previously but still I would encourage parents if you have a child with a computer and online you need to take a very active interest on a daily basis about what your child is doing online. Are there any particular styles of gaming science? What we're finding there's a trend where we will find a forum that is used by children a trend I suppose you'd call predators online very quickly are becoming tuned to those forums. What is a trend this week will not be a trend next week because not only will the children move to another site but also the offenders move to other sites. Offenders generally speaking if they get the kid are they going to commit a crime or do they get off on the fact that they're just talking to them online? What we're finding in Argos at the moment is at about 80% of the people that are engaging on online activity will be contact offenders. By that I mean they're trying to get to a child to commit a real live offence against that child. How many people are you like in having per week or do you figure that out for months? Well probably more importantly instead of the arrest of people is the identification of child victims. So this year so far we've identified 18 child victims 10 of those children have been in Queensland. Well this year so far as I've said within Queensland we've identified and proactively removed 10 children from harm. That's a huge majority in Queensland compared to the rest of Australia. Well most of our activity has been targeted within Queensland although we look at activity worldwide. Last year we had a number of referrals to other countries including Russia. We had one referral where 12 children were identified in Russia. So we identified children in other countries which we will share that information with other law enforcement participants in other countries but also our focus is on making sure children within Queensland are safe and this year that's led to 10 children being removed from harm. So it's 10 children that otherwise we would not know about are being offended against. So does that mean that there's been 10 people charged? Yes. With children that are offended against traditionally people think that it's a stranger. Well it's often not a stranger. It's often somebody within the family unit or a family friend or somebody who has engaged in activity to build a relationship with a child in a short period of time for the purpose of offending against that child. So most of those children well I'll say 100% of those children that are offended against their offender had a relationship of types with them. And you identified those children by photographs? By photographs. So the offense there was a the person known to the child was then putting material on the internet which you were able to identify? That's right. They were sharing that material with other people with an interest in child exploitation material and some of that material was shared with law enforcement participants such as ourselves. Once we gain those images we have now in Argos got a victim identification unit which is now full time and the job of that unit is to actually identify those children from that photo. Do people make money from sharing this material? No. It's for a personal gain. Okay is that about it? So do you think the number of victims is increasing or decreasing? I think I can't give a number are they increasing or decreasing because how do we know the number that we don't know about? There may be children out in the community in countries now that are getting abused. So the people that you do know about I mean are we seeing more arrests or less arrests? I think we're seeing more arrests because police are getting very good at this type of work. We're becoming better at our methodologies that we're using and also the increase in the use in the internet. We're seeing a lot of younger children using the internet all the time now. So the sheer volume of use of the internet and children on the internet is also leading to more offending. Is it going to be targeting a specific methodology? It is. There's a series of methodologies that Task Force Argos have been using we've been developing them over years. We have found them to be very effective so what we wish to do this week is share those methodologies with other law enforcement participants and forces such as Singapore and hopefully they'll leave this week with those skills and strategies which they can then put in place in their own jurisdictions. My main message to parents is quite simple know what your children are doing all the time if you don't know, ask the question. If you're allowing your child on the internet you're opening the front door of your house.